Stroud Township man served in the Pacific, married on Dec. 7, 1945

Friday

Dec 7, 2012 at 12:01 AM

Martin Hammond was probably getting drunk in Los Angeles on Dec. 7, 1941, when he learned that the Japanese had attacked the U.S. Naval base at Pearl Harbor. It's what 20-year-old Marines did when they were on R&R.

HOWARD FRANK

Martin Hammond was probably getting drunk in Los Angeles on Dec. 7, 1941, when he learned that the Japanese had attacked the U.S. Naval base at Pearl Harbor. It's what 20-year-old Marines did when they were on R&R.

Six months later, Hammond was climbing trees and ducking mortars in the South Pacific.

As a result of that wartime shelling, the 91-year-old Stroud Township man lost much of his hearing. Still, his wit remains sharp. So too does his spirit and sense of humor.

Today marks not only the 71st commemoration of the attack on Pearl Harbor, but it's also Hammond's 67th wedding anniversary. To a girl named Pearl.

Hammond was stationed in San Diego in 1941 and on leave in Los Angeles that day.

"It was automatic. It just came over the (radio) news, for everybody to get back to their base as fast as they could. I think we made it about 125 miles in less than two hours," he recalled.

Hammond reacted to the attack as most men with youthful naivete would.

"I didn't worry about it," he said.

Three months later he was sent overseas.

"They just told us that we were going, but not where."

First it was to Australia for training, and then to the combat zones.

Hammond, a corporal, was a telephone lineman. His job was to string wires between battalion headquarters and the front lines. Sometimes only 200 to 300 yards separated command and the battle.

Hammond would climb about 15 to 20 feet up coconut trees.

"It took us about 10 seconds to wrap that wire around the tree and tie and knot before we went down," he said.

Hammond enlisted in the armed forces in 1940. Yet it wasn't solely for patriotic reasons.

"I wanted to get off the farm," he said. "I didn't like it."

That was in Nebraska, where he was the oldest of nine children. He'd grown tired of milking cows and living in a small town. His high school graduating class had just six students.

First Hammond tried enlisting in the Navy but he was underweight.

"I weighed a 123 and they said I had to weigh 125. I went across the hall and the Marines took me."

Hammond was in the initial wave of amphibious landing craft to reach the shore of Okinawa in April of 1945. The Battle of Okinawa was the Pacific theater's equivalent of D-Day.

There were a huge number of casualties. The water turned red with blood from all the soldiers killed in the landing.

"There were shells coming. You could hear them coming. You could tell by the sound of it if they would fall short or long or be right at you," he said.

Did Hammond look for the first foxhole he could find?

"A foxhole? Any kind of hole you could find," he said as though the question was dumb.

"You were always scared to some degree but you learned. You knew it was going to be there so you just looked for the first hole you could get in so it would go over you."

Hammond met his future wife, Pearl DeLong, before the war. The couple spent several years apart, almost three straight years in one stretch while he was stationed overseas. But they stayed in touch by sending letters to each other.

The military read all outgoing letters from the Marines.

"What they did to us," Pearl said, was "they would black it out or cut it out. If you wrote on the back of the letters you didn't know what they said."

As soon as Hammond returned from the Pacific theater, he and Pearl traveled to Arizona where they were married by a justice of the peace.

The date was Dec. 7, 1945.

They never realized it was the anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack.

And while a nation pays tribute to those killed 71 years ago today, it's his wedding anniversary that Hammond remembers most.